Brahms and Lauridsen

Program Notes

by Peter Rutenberg Johannes Brahms and Morten Johannes Lauridsen III stand as imposing figures - each on the threshold of a new cenrury, each with a vantage point that only world-centeredness can convey. There was Vienna, serving the latest, most civilized refinements in art and science - the High Tea of culture and knowledge, if you will. While here is Los Angeles, serving the latest in trend-setting fashion, international commerce and high-tech entertainment - the gourmet version of eye-andear candy. Vienna's Ring was designed for promenades, streetcars, and caffeinated confections; the ring of freeways atound Los Angeles harbor a giant slot-car game of one-upsmanship, encircling towering paeans to money and music, trompe l'oeil architecture, and decaf frappuccinos. And yet, there is Brahms, with his Goethes and Schillers, Palestrinas and Mozans, priming inspirations of word and sound, supporting a predilection for universal human appeal, even as seeds for Freud's subconscious and Schoenberg's atonality ate sprouting. And now there is Lauridsen, conscious of the unsquanderable anistic essence in ten centuries of musical tradition, breathing new life with his own kind of universal appeal into the waning years of choral music's first millennium, laying the foundation for a new age of soul-provoking, beanrending, mind-aligning dynatnism that makes his music so rewarding to listen to and so easy to love. Brahms is the great gifr-giver of his age for singers of all kinds, for choirs of all sizes and shapes. His eatly mentor, Robert Schumann, himself a fierce tunesmith and hatmonist, must have proved a formidable taskmaster for the lad from Hamburg when first he knocked on that famous door in Düsseldorf. Yet Passion was the prevalent commodity - both in the Schumanns' music parlor, with the agile talents and sometimes coy smile of his wife Clata, and in the correspondence that darted from Johannes' and Clara's quills and from those of their everwidening circle of friends throughout their lives. Passion was quintessential to the Romantic era's thrust. And Passion in all its guises is what we heat most in the music of Brahms featured on this program. When the orderly masquerade of the Classical era gave way in the 19th cenrury to more humanistic and natural impulses, to a more probing exploration of forces both external and internal, the whole issue of universal order came into play. In Friedrich Hölderlin's Schicksalslied (or Hyperion's Song of Destiny), the unjust divide between heaven and eatth is described merely as destiny: the "heavenly ones" have none, while their spirits blossom and "their blessed eyes gaze in tranquil, eternal clarity." We earthbound, on the other, withered hand, "find rest nowhere...like water hurled blindly from crag to crag in utter uncertainty." The most striking image is the question of vision: is it really our lot not to see, or can we choose to see. Can we choose to choose? Scored for four-part chorus and orchestra (cbmprising double winds and brass, timpani and strings), Brahms' Schicksalslied, Op. 54, was completed in 1871 and follows the form of the three-stanza poem. The key-signature of three flats first issues in E-flat major, in a rich depiction of heaven. An ominous dissolution into the relative C minor, matked by agitated strings, portrays the abject grief of our own earthly lot. The chorus fades away as the datker alto-bass combination echoes the soprano-tenor utterance of the word "uncertainty," swallowed up in the quiet brooding of the densely-voiced orchestra, now in a fateful C major. Brahms' Ave Maria, Op. 12, scored for four-part chorus of women's voices and orchestra, dates from 1858, and was first performed the following yeat in Hamburg. An organ accompaniment preceded the composer's arrangement for small orchestra. Biographer Karl Geiringer points out (in Brahms: His Lift and Work) that this early piece has some "experimental" qualities about it. He ascribes to it a "tender but somewhat impersonal charm" and suggests that the composer was prone to find more inspiration in some German texts than in the Latin of the Roman Catholic liturgy. We must remember that it had only been two years since Schumann's death, a trying time for the tight-knit community around that household. The young Johannes would also have been wrestling with his abiding love for Clara and the fateful choice of remaining a bachelor for the sake of his art. Could it be her, held at arm's length, that makes the Ave Maria seem distant? As much as he reveled in the special colors of women's voices - he founded a women's chorus in Hamburg in 1859 which he directed until his departure for Vienna in 1862 - Brahms was hardly immune to the equally distinctive colors of men's voices, and was to write his large-scale cantata Rinaldo, Op. 50, for tenor solo, male chorus and orchestra in 1863, completing the last chorus some five years later. The stage was set for the cherished Rhapsodic, Op. 53, for contralto, men's chorus and orchestra, more commonly known as the Alto Rhapsody, completed in 1869, and first performed in Jena in March of the next year. Taken from Goethe's Harzreise im Winter - a somber tale of a winter's journey in the Harz Mountains - the text offered the composer a chance to explore the theme of loneliness and unrequited love in his own life. Introspection is one thing, but timing is everything, for it was the wedding of Clata Schumann's daughter Julie that had, for better or worse, provided the catalyst for this deeply personal moment of soul-searching. Low winds and menacing string tremolos announce the mood. After 17 measures, a pause, whereupon the contralto ..... asks, "Who-is that, off to the side?" In the style of a densely-accompanied recitative, the soloist reveals the image of the lost wayfarer, consumed by the wasteland he treads. The violins, in unison with the singer, accompanied by broken chords in the viola and pedal tones in the cello and bass, establish a tempo of some movement, while details of the ponrait are painted in more anxious tones: "Who can heal the pains of a man for whom balm has become poison?" At last, the sonorous men's chorus joins the soloist in intoning the prayer: "Father of love, if on your psaltery there is one note he can hear, then refresh his hean ... open his eyes to the thousand springs ... as he thirsts in the desen." Brahms works the ensemble as a unit, essentially in five-pan counterpoint. That the solo voice stands out is merely a result of being on top, and not, one hastens to add, of a desire on the pan of the composer to differentiate its character. It is precisely the "universal human relevance" of this text that holds so much appeal for Brahms, biographer Heinz Beckler proposes. Beginning with the Requiem, Op. 45, it is a trait that informs most all of his mature oeuvre and heralds what Geiringer calls the "Hellenic spirit" of his later choral works. The riptide that is Romantic destiny drags us into the sea of weakness and self-destruction in the Alto Rhapsody. In Nänie, Op. 82, even immonal Thetis, rising from the sea, cannot save her son Achilles from his destiny in the Trojan War. Brahms set Friedrich von Schiller's Nänie for four-pan chorus and orchestra {scored for double winds and horns, three trombones, timpani, harp and strings) during 1880-81 and dedicated it to Mme Henriette Feuerbach, in honor of her late stepson and the composer's friend, painter Anselm Feuerbach; it was premiered in Zurich in December of 1881. "Even the beautiful must die," begins the Dirge. "Commoners die unmourned," it ends; but Brahms defrly places the penultimate line of text last in his music, as if to insist, "Yet to be a song of mourning on loved ones' lips is magnificent." So it is with this Dirge. Nänie is structured in what Geiringer calls a "monumental" ABA form. The central "radiance" of the F-sharp-major B-section swells with the image of Thetis and her sea-nymphs, surging fonh from the blue, and quietly returning to D major at the death of"perfection." The shoner third section resolves heroically in the tender glow of heavenly light - a genuine and sincere farewell from one anist to another. Composer-in-Residence Monen Lauridsen's Mid-Winter Songs on Poems by Robert Graves were written for the USC Chamber Singers on the occasion of the University of Southern California's Centennial Celebration in 1980 and premiered by that ensemble in March 1981. The orchestral version was debuted in April 1983 by Roben Duerr and the Pasadena Chamber Orchestra, and, through the encouragement of then LAMC Board President Marshall Rutter, subsequently performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale under both Roger Wagner and John Currie. Both versions have since been frequently performed throughout the world. The work is recorded by Maestro Salamunovich and the Chorale on the Grammynominated album, Lauridsen - Lux Aeterna (RCM 19705). Monen Lauridsen first came to USC as a student, studying under Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens and Roben Linn. He later completed his mentor Stevens' unfinished scores, assuming the chairmanship of USC's Composition Department, where he remains today. Just as Brahms left his birthplace in Hamburg for the inspiration of cosmopolitan Vienna, Lauridsen has built a professional base in Los Angeles, dividing his local time between USC's School of Music and his Hollywood Hills studio, with its wooded canyon views. Summers are spent in solitary communion with nature and the Muse, on one of the more remote San Juan Islands between Washington state and Vancouver Island - a felicitous source of renewal and inspiration for the composer. The original version of Mid-Winter Songs is scored for chamber chorus and piano. The integrity of the musical material, the masterful setting of the texts, and the piano interludes leave one with the impression that choir and keyboard are organically, symbiotically united. The orchestration summons a sumptuous palette of instrumental colors to define the often dense, contrapuntal textures, and to underscore Graves' powerfully concentrated lyrics, while maintaining the organic unity between chorus and orchestra. The effect is positively transponing. The composer recalls the songs' creation in these words: "In reading the complete works of the English poet Roben Graves, I became very much taken with the richness, elegance and extraordinary beauty of his poetry and his insights regarding the human experience. Five diverse poems with a common 'winter' motif (a panicular favorite of mine, rich in the symbolism of dying and rejuvenation, light and darkness) suggested a cohesive cycle and led to the composition of Mid-Winter Songs. The cycle is cast in an overall arch form, and the principal musical materials are derived from the opening choral setting of the text "Dying Sun."' Like Niinie, the final movement of the Songs seeks to mollify the hardness of death - in this case the year's end - with a plea for one last ray of warmth. Indeed, our lives do "shine warm a little longer" for this glorious music!

Archival Recording